India's Teachers' Day falls on the birthday of a president who studied philosophy by accident
When Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan became India's president, students asked to celebrate his birthday. He suggested they mark the date as a day for teachers instead, and 5 September has been Teachers' Day ever since. Fittingly, the philosopher only ended up in philosophy because a cousin handed down his old textbooks.
He was born in 1888 in Tiruttani, then in the Madras Presidency, to a Telugu Brahmin family of modest means; his father was a minor revenue official for a local landlord. Scholarships carried him through school and Madras Christian College. He had hoped to study mathematics, but when a cousin who had finished the same course passed on his philosophy books, the cheaper path settled the matter.
His Christian professors provoked his life's work. Their criticism of Indian culture, he later said, shook his faith and hurt his pride as a Hindu, so he set out to find what in Hinduism was living and what was dead. His bachelor's thesis, rebutting the claim that Vedanta had no room for ethics, was published when he was just twenty. Even so, he called one of those critics, Alfred George Hogg, his distinguished teacher.
An academic career of unusual range followed: Mysore, the King George V chair at Calcutta from 1921, Hibbert Lectures at Oxford that became An Idealist View of Life, and in 1936 the Spalding chair of Eastern Religion and Ethics at Oxford, which he held until 1952. He was knighted in 1931 but dropped the title after independence, preferring Doctor. Grounding his thought in Advaita Vedanta, he became known as a bridge between Indian and Western thinking and was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Politics came late. He represented India at UNESCO, served as ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952, then became the country's first vice president and, from 1962 to 1967, its second president, despite no background in the Congress Party or the independence movement. He received the Bharat Ratna in 1954, helped found HelpAge India, lived as a lifelong vegetarian and teetotaller, and died in Madras in 1975 at 86.
Source: Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
